


Final Draft

by owlpockets



Category: NCIS
Genre: Gen, Graduate School, Pre-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-01
Updated: 2016-12-01
Packaged: 2018-09-03 15:11:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,531
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8718667
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/owlpockets/pseuds/owlpockets
Summary: Despite all her talents, Abby has fears that she'll never have a successful career without compromising her identity.





	

**Author's Note:**

> There's a lot of hand-waving about the timeline - it's been implied that Abby has a PhD in the show, so I was going on that and Pauley Perrette's real life age.
> 
> ...Okay, so maybe this is also me venting in fic form a little bit.
> 
> Written for [Heroine Big Bang](http://heroinebigbang.livejournal.com/) round four redux. Most excellent banner by [twisted_slinky](http://twisted-slinky.livejournal.com/108184.html)!

“Abby…it’s really time to schedule your defense. You’re ready.”

Those words turned her stomach and make her fingers go cold and numb. Of course, Abby knew it would have to happen eventually, but there were so many…things to fix. Results to finalize. Conclusions to tweak. Figures to redraw.

“The only good dissertation is a done dissertation, yessir, Dr. Smith, sir,” Abby parroted her adviser’s overused motivational advice and saluted.

Dr. Smith sighed across his desk and folded his hands across his stomach. His eyes flickered briefly down towards her outfit and an almost imperceptible frown tugged the corners of his mouth. “Perfectionism isn’t going to help your career, you know this.” What he said and what he meant didn’t line up at all, but Abby was used to the disconnect. He meant well, she thought for the tenth time that year, and there were far worse options.

Abby fidgeted with a mostly blank page in her planner. Two months until the end of the semester. She could do everything in two months. She slid her gaze to the side and dropped her finger on a random day. “Umm…May 5?”

“Fine,” answered Dr. Smith after a pause to check his own calendar. “As long as the rest of your committee is available.”

Abby took several shallow breaths and nodded as she stood up to leave too fast. Her boot caught on the leg of the chair and toppled a small stack of books next to her in the cramped office before escaping into the hall.

In the deserted women’s bathroom, Abby took several deep gulps of air and exhaled each slowly. She tried to recall her daily meditation steps, but it was hard to still the storm in her head. Defending meant graduating, graduating meant searching for jobs, a job meant change. Her eyes snapped wide open and she looked at herself in the mirror. “You will survive this,” Abby stated confidently to her reflection. But she didn’t feel confident at all.  
__

Abby was almost finished with her casework for the day, and it was early enough that she could have some time to catch up on other tasks. The answering machine had been blinking with messages since mid-morning, and her assistant hadn’t dared touch it, knowing she was waiting for an important call about a teaching position. 

No one else was left in the lab when Abby sat down, placing both hands down flat on the desk. She inhaled and held it, staring down the blinking light before hitting the button quickly before she could change her mind. The first message was about a delayed supply order and Abby deflated slightly as she deleted it. The next one was for her, a reserved and faintly distracted voice she recognized as belonging to the chair of the criminal justice department at Michigan State. He called her _Miss_ Sciuto, though she was a half a step away from doctor, and followed with a series of platitudes about how they were “very sorry” and couldn’t offer her the position at this time. Abby heard in her head what they couldn’t say out loud and she shut off the message, feeling her eyes prickle unpleasantly.

The rest of the messages were either not urgent or not for her, and Abby cycled through them as quickly as possible, ignoring the faint trickle of tears on her cheeks. Crying over a job wasn’t something Abby was willing to acknowledge. Not yet, anyway—defeat was not in her vocabulary.

Abby stopped the messages and kicked her boot lightly against the leg of the table. She needed to blow off some steam or she was going to burst from the strain of holding everything inside, guts spilling and pooling over the floor, running into the cracks in the linoleum. It was a gross, but somehow comforting mental image. Abby kept tapping her boot while she picked up the phone and dialed a number.

“Scott? It’s Abby.” Her friend’s easy, agreeable voice greeted her on the other end of the line. She chanced a half a grin for herself; he didn’t sound busy. “Want to work on the hearse?”

“Dude, you know it!” Scott answered immediately and enthusiastically. “Meet you thirty minutes?”

“I’ll be there!” Abby replied, grinning for real now. She said goodbye and hung up, tearing off her lab coat and tossing it in the general direction of the rack without waiting to see where it landed. There was a bus in three minutes, so if she hurried she might beat Scott to his house.

She did not, but perhaps it was better to not creep out the neighbors by sitting on the porch alone, a stranger in dark lipstick and darker clothes. The garage was already open and lit, classic rock tunes starting up as Abby stomped up the driveway. “One day I’m going to have to teach you about good music,” she told him instead of a greeting.

“Foreigner is good music,” Scott protested, frowning deeply at her. His wire-frame glasses were sliding endearingly down his skinny nose. From his pin straight dark hair to his oil-stained sneakers, all of him was skinny in a pulled out taffy kind of way that Abby found utterly unattractive, but utterly charming all the same.

Abby shook her head slowly, “I promise you, Foreigner wasn’t even cool in the 70s.”

"Cool music is not the same as good music," Scott answered serenely and handed Abby some coveralls that had seen better days to wear over her clothes. "What are we working on today?"

"Umm..." _My life_ , Abby thought to herself while she dressed. She was wearing old clothes and didn't particularly care about stains, but she felt important and professional in the coveralls, a minor ego boost after an emotionally draining afternoon. "The brakes?"

"Alright, that should be pretty straightforward." Scott spread out his tools on the table while he hummed tunelessly along to the music. "How was your meeting with your adviser today?"

"I don't know. Good." Abby supposed being told she was ready to defend was theoretically a good thing, but her mind was crowded with doubts. "My defense is scheduled for May 5, but I still don't have any job offers. I wish Dr. Smith would be a little more helpful with that or at least find out if I could have a temporary teaching position here for the time being. I've asked, but he's so noncommittal about it."

"I'm sure something will come your way eventually, Abby. You're really talented, but I guess a lot of employers have a hard time seeing past the..." Scott made a vague gesture toward her body. "You know?"

"Boobs?" Abby snapped back, not misinterpreting his meaning, but feeling the need to lash out about something.

Scott shrank into his coveralls. "No, no...I meant the tattooed goth thing. It doesn't line up with their image of what a PhD should look like, even if they all know your work is solid. Not that there's anything wrong with how you look," he added quickly. He finished the sentiment in an awkward and unsatisfying way, "I would hire you in a heartbeat."

"Thanks," she grumbled, self-consciously tugging on her sleeves. "Let's work, I don't want to think about job hunting anymore today." And they did, falling into a companionable silence, save for perfunctory instructions from Scott. It was easy to clear her head like this.

Abby went home feeling strangely empty—no uncertainty, no disappointment, and certainly not questioning herself. She thought maybe she should be feeling these things, or at least frustration that she couldn’t seem to come to an acceptable compromise that didn’t involve compromising her convictions in the process. Abby dropped her bag on the floor, kicked off her boots, and went straight to the freezer to pick out an extra-plump mouse to thaw for Sir Cornelius’s dinner. “Corny, maybe we should just fail the defense and stay in grad school,” Abby said as she dropped into her chair and leaned on her hands near the tank. She sighed. “It’s easy here.”

The snake, of course, said nothing, staring at her from his coil in the corner without moving more than his tongue. “Well, that was rude,” Abby huffed. She switched on her computer and brought up her email out of habit rather than interest. There were a few messages, mostly from her gaming buddies, but one was from Dr. Harbert, a member of her committee she was pretty sure had dropped off the face of the earth after not seeing him in a full year. It was brief, just a ‘thought you might be interested’ and a link to a government website. 

Curious, Abby clicked and discovered it was for a job listing for a forensic scientist at an organization of which she was only vaguely aware, NCIS. There were brief lists of qualifications and responsibilities, and a number to contact for more information. Abby stared at the screen long after she had read the text; the listing had very little to go on. “Okay…why not?” she said aloud, and wrote down the number to call from her lab in the morning.


End file.
